Measuring the rarity of a particle decay: Five hundred thousand times less likely than winning the lottery
Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - 21:56
in Physics & Chemistry
Modern physics has developed a great number of theoretical approaches with which the world of elementary particles can be described. Now it's up to experiments to sort out which theories hold up against reality. One of these is the so-called MEG experiment. Physicists are searching for a particular, yet never-to-date observed decay of elementary particles known as muons. More precisely, they are quantifying how high the improbability of this decay is. According to their latest number, at most one out of 2.4 trillion muon decays will fit the MEG pattern. That makes such a decay around five hundred thousand times more improbable than hitting all six numbers in the Swiss lottery.